Thursday, February 24, 2011

Let it not be said that the Democrats are the only stupid party in this country. Since I’ve been bashing them up quite a bit lately, I’ll spare a punch or two for their counterparts. Four stories in particular have been buzzing in my RSS feed.

In Congress, Republicans are proposing some spending cuts. That’s good, depending on what they’re cutting. But those cuts exempt one of our biggest economic drains: farm subsidies. Worse, they are retaining the program by which we pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Brazilian farmers to prevent a trade war over said subsidies. This would seem to be a no-brainer—save billions by subsidizing neither American nor Brazilian farmers. But with a party that sometimes has no brain…

Then we have the anti-abortion loon in Georgia who wants the state to not only outlaw abortion, even if the mother’s life is at stake, but to investigate miscarriages to make sure they’re not secret abortions. There are probably as many miscarriages every year as there are live births, so that should keep people busy. It’s jobs program, really. Mr. No-Fetus-Left-Behind also wants to rebrand rape victims as “accusers” for no obvious reason other than being a pinhead.

Then there’s Jeff Cox, the now former Wisconsin state attorney who not only said the protests should be dispersed with live ammo, but stood by those remarks until his ass got fired. It’s not just that he said something stupid; it’s that he gave live ammunition to the Left to brand the GOP side as mindless thugs. So ... thanks, a lot, asshole.

Finally, we have Arizona, which is considering another wave of illegal immigrants laws, the pinnacle of which is a special birth certificate for children of illegals that says Arizona doesn’t recognize them as US citizens. You can imagine how the Left is falling over themselves with Godwin’s Law on that one. The funniest part is that this has provoked a bunch of Left-wing morons to talk about secession from the state. This is being met with applause from the Left. You can imagine, of course, how’d they’d react if a conservative county in California talked about seceding. We’d hear endless screaming about Right Wing loons and their dangerous extreme secessionist rhetoric.

My occasional alignment with the GOP is not because I love Republicans or am not aware that the party includes a lot of morons, thugs and dim bulbs. I am temporarily siding with them, in some disputes, because debt is the issue of the day. It’s not going to do us any good to have legal abortion or whatever if we’re all in the poor house anyway. Still, I wish we’d have more primary challenges to these embarrassments rather than RINOs. These twerps are harming any chance of fixing our debt problems by opening the window to branding an entire party as a bunch of creeps. Can’t they stay focused on the task at hand?

One final note on a Right Wing Idiocy that isn’t an idiocy. You may be aware of the prank phone call some Leftist pulled calling Scott Walker and pretending to be on of the Koch Brothers (cue scary music for guys who have less financial pull than ... just about every big union in the country). Even Ezra Klein admits that this has been blown way out of proportion. I’m with Reihan Salam:

I hate to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure that virtually all elected officials are willing to talk to campaign donors, rich people, and celebrities. Think about it. You’re basically the kind of person who ran for student body president, and suddenly really, really important people want to talk to you. Imagine how thrilling that must be! It should go without saying that this is completely pathetic. This is a big part of why we right-wingers think that politicians should have very narrow, circumscribed powers. They’re not an attractive bunch. Speaking only for myself, the politicians I come closest to admiring are the bona fide nerds who’d rather hang out at a diner in rural Indiana than talk to billionaires or celebrities.

If any billionaire who could potentially fund my work calls my office, they can get right through to me. They can even call my cell phone. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: if you want rich people to stop controlling our government, stop making it worth their while by getting the government involved in every sector of our economy.

There’s enough idiocy among GOPers to go around. Why on Earth would someone want to manufacture some? Well because citizenship revocation, miscarriage investigation and protester shooting are very unlikely to ever happen. But breaking the unions is a distinct possibility. And so the attempts to smear Scott Walker continue apace. As does the attempt to find the most extreme elements in his party with which to brand him.

I just wish the GOP wouldn’t make it so easy sometimes.

Update:Here is the transcript of the Walker-"Koch" conversation. I’ve read through it twice and I still don’t see anything incriminating or damning. Walker does most of the talking and comes off a bit full of himself, perhaps. But there’s really no there there, unless you pull out a few select quotes were Walker was joking or dismissing “Koch“‘s suggestion of planting troublemakers amid the protesters.